Sid Meier’s F-15 Flight Eagle was one of my first wargames on the computer.

It wasn’t my first. I think that distinction goes to Chris Crawford’s Eastern Front. Both of these were for the Atari home computer. Both games were played with a joystick, as there was no such thing as a mouse on those early Atari home computer systems. Naturally, for a flight simulation, playing with a joystick actually made sense. Less so Eastern Front.

Two of the sets of missions in Flight Eagle were attacks on North Vietnam. At the time, I don’t think I considered the obvious problem with that. I can only assume that the thinking went, since Flight Eagle was a pretty primitive “simulator” as it was, the distinction between an F-15 and an F-4 was probably not all that great as far as the game went.

I remember the game giving me a very negative feeling about flight operations over North Vietnam. The two missions take place in the Spring of 1972 and have you face very deadly surface-to-air missiles, deployed to prevent you from completing them successfully. I remember rarely feeling good after a session against Haiphong or Hanoi. That feeling is at least a part of the reason I haven’t really done much gaming since with respect to the air war in Vietnam.

Another reason is probably that there just aren’t that many choices. I can think of a couple of Vietnam-themed games, either flight sims or tactical air games, but as it goes with the Vietnam War and other genres, this is just not the most popular era for computer gaming.

All that said, there is one option that we’ve talked about before. The continuing modifications of the IL-2 Sturmovik: 1946 package and, in particular, its “Jet Age” mod, gives us some material for Vietnam as well as Korea.

Since I last flew some jets, this package of modifications has undergone (yet again) some major upgrades. The Community Universal Patch (CUP) of a few years back has been turned into Battlefield Airborne Tactical (BAT). The focus is apparently to simplify the processes for installing, using, and adding to this monster pack of upgrades for IL-2.

For me, who just wants to get to flying around in a plane, the depth of it all starts to overwhelm. The configurability of IL-2 is just astounding. Even with a turnkey system like BAT, there is a seemingly endless combination of options available to the player. It is truly the case that working with BAT is a much simpler process than where I was, running with CUP. Even still, upgrading the system has been a multi-week process of establishing a clean base install and then layering the mods and patches on top of it. It could have gone much faster, but I wanted to make sure I tested after each step so I could understand how any changes were being introduced.

To start flying, and to fit those missions chronologically with the other Vietnam scenarios I’m playing, I started with a campaign called Vietnam 1965. This scenario is built for the “Dark Blue World” comprehensive mod, as well as a series of other mods, and was active in the 2012-13 timeframe. As such, it is actually an older version than CUP (much less BAT). It is also (somewhat) incompatible with both versions.

The problem, as far as I can tell, is that the DBW campaign uses objects that are not supported by the current BAT. Either the naming conventions are a little off, or they are specialized models created just for the Vietnam scenarios (e.g. Viet Cong Infantry models). When trying to play the campaign, it starts out with me standing next to a smoking plane wreck.

Since the Campaign doesn’t work, what I did instead is to load each mission of the campaign individually, using the “Full Mission Builder” (now much better integrated with BAT without trying to use those additional mods that made it work with CUP). What I found was that as long as the player-controlled plane is supported, the scenarios do run even when the mission load is throwing errors. Many of them do have problems with the player-controlled plane, but not all.

An outpost north of Saigon has come under attack and has called in a napalm strike.

The campaign obviously had a lot of work put into it. You can see in the above screenshot an example. The scenario builder created a U.S. remote base down to some very impressive detail. After dropping my ordnance, I flew back to the airbase near Saigon, a trip that showcases the Vietnam map. This, again, displays some impressive effort on the part of the map’s creators. I will say it would be nice if this campaign could be updated to use the 2018 state-of-the-art, but I imagine that also would be a lot of work.

Also in the above, you’ll probably notice that my chosen mission is to provide close air support leading a flight of Douglas A-1 Skyraiders. The bulk of this campaign pack’s missions are flying helicopters, but I’m not quite ready for that just yet. That is assuming, of course, that the helicopter models are compatible between the versions, which I am pretty sure they are not. But having found and loaded a mission that is supported, the flying goes pretty seamlessly with all the upgrades. Most of the missing models are ground units, which I consider icing on the cake anyway. My plane and appropriate armaments are there, as are my targets. I find the Skyraider is a lot easier to fly than what I remember of the Me-109s. I don’t know if that is an accurate reflection of their characteristics, or a difference in focus when it comes to the IL-2 models.

I will mention a couple of other issues I had, just because I spent so much time chasing my own tail with them. First of all, the “record” function doesn’t seem to work properly if there are issues with the mission file. Or rather, I should say the video-capture’s saving function. Everything seems like it is recording, but then when it is time to save, an error message says it can’t do it. The funny thing is that it worked for me two or three times, and I don’t know why. Success doesn’t seem related to which file I’ve loaded or which CUP/BAT version I’m running. I’ve both succeeded and failed in nearly all permutations I’ve tried.

I did manage to record one bombing run using the CUP version and used it to grab the screenshot posted above. In doing so, I found another compatibility problem post upgrade. Grabbing screenshots also doesn’t seem to work as it once did, though I put in quite a bit of effort with it. Finally I found an on-line suggestion to run the program inside Steam, and then use the Steam screen capture function to record the graphic. That actually worked very well, it just took me forever to get to that point.

Back to that screenshot. Note the display of speed, altitude, and heading down the lower left. I’ve come to count on that being there and never learned to deal with the instrument panel. After upgrading to BAT, that display is gone. Try as I might, I can’t figure out what made it gone. Finally, I just decided to try to learn to land using my own eyes and the actual instrument panel. Sometimes, when I am trying to land my plane, I make it down.

The BAT release has one set of missions, centered around the Tet Offensive, that are created to be compatible. I also notice that the BAT documentation makes much of a Vietnam campaign which begins with the Gulf of Tonkin. As far as I can tell, that new campaign is not yet available.

I’ll continue on with this, but the take-away is that the mod community is providing a lot of good stuff for those of us who’d like to fly the not-so-friendly skies of Vietnam.

Return to the master post for Vietnam War. To get out of the cockpit and experience the air war from the commander’s chair, mosey on to the next article.

Thirty-five or so years ago, we were at the crest of a wave of military boardgames from the likes of Avalon Hill and SPI. We were also entering the era of the personal computer. For players of these games, we expected that nirvana was right around the corner. First, the computer could provide us with opponents**, rather than forcing us to draft our girlfriends or younger brothers. Second, as the rules of board war games got more and more complex, simulating all the details of the wars they modeled, we saw the computer as a handy bookkeeper. No longer would we have to cross reference results across 5 different tables. Just select attack and let the machine work it all out.

As games began to develop, they often disappointed. Getting a computer to do everything we wanted it to was a lot harder than it seemed like it would be. Still, our dreams seemed just a few iterations away.

As an Avalon Hill guy, my list of games were:

Tactical – Advanced Squad Leader

Grand Tactical – PanzerBlitz/ Panzer Leader

Operational – Oddly, I had no go-to WWII board game. The Operational game I owned was Waterloo.

Strategic – The Rise and Decline of the Third Reich

Honorable Mention – Submarine (I always thought this would have been the easiest to convert)

The Operational game, for me, was solved for the computer early on. The amazing Chris Crawford created Eastern Front in 1981 and provided an early example of getting it right. It was available across platforms, I had a copy on my families Atari 800.

Perhaps supporting my theory, and perhaps showing us the way of the future, the computer game Silent Service was released in 1985. It was not, however, a “board game simulator“, reproducing the hex-and-counter movement of a game like Submarine. Instead, you are put inside the submarine, using the gauges, maps, and periscope as your interface. Much of the wargaming world would take decades to learn the lessons about what works better and worse on the computer screen.

In the other areas, direct conversions of the games themselves proved to be elusive. Avalon Hill’s Third Reich (1992) conversion was largely a disappointment and the in-the-works Squad Leader development for the PC never seemed to materialize. However, as we progressed through the 1990s, computer games which were actually capable of replacing those board games began to appear on the market.

Everyone’s list is going to be a little different, but for me this was how it happened.

In 1992, High Command fulfilled the promise of Third Reich that the official game never could. Yes, it lacked all the nuances in the rules that made the original board game what it was, but it was playable and it was fun.

The floodgates seemed to open after games began releasing on Windows. Programming for games started to be less an exercise in trying to get more speed, memory and graphics out a system and more reliant on a common base structure. Perhaps it was just that the machines were more capable, or perhaps because this freed developers to write games instead of graphics optimization, but the games that starting coming out then still can look passable on the modern desktop***.

In 1996, Close Combat finally brought the tactical WWII game to the PC in a way that satisfied the hard-core wargamer’s thirst for realism. We’ll not argue on how Advanced Squad Leader may have fallen short of realism all along, but Close Combat brought the right pieces together. Although for me, it was Combat Mission (1999) that changed landscape and finally provided the long sought-after experience. See the Submarine/Silent Service comments above.

For PanzerBlitz, we were given our fix in 1997 when East Front was released by Talonsoft as the final installment in their Battleground series. Interestingly, while Battleground was mostly Civil War and Napoleonic War scenarios, it was book-ended by two World War II games. East Front fulfilled the PanzerBlitz niche by providing the toolkit for grand-tactical level combat on the Eastern Front. But Battleground 1 was a Battle of the Bulge game (1995). Amazingly, the look and feel of the latest in John Tiller’s game at that scale, Panzer Battles: Battles of Normandy, would be very familiar to the purchasers of Battleground: Bulge-Ardennes.

Battleground 11: East Front was followed by the titles West Front (1998), East Front II (1999), and Rising Sun (2000) to round out the World War II experience of Panzer Leader, PanzerBlitz and beyond to the Pacific under the heading the “Campaign Series.” In 2001, the Arab-Israeli Wars equivalent was added as the final iteration of this set of releases.

Quite forgotten, until I started looking at the release dates, was Battleground 10. Battleground 10 was a Middle East game, but one I don’t remember anything about when it came out. Searching finds precious little on it, so I wonder if my experience is not typical.

I myself bought Divided Ground, perhaps as a part of a Campaign Series package with all four games. This was considered to be the Ugly Duckling of the series. It had considerably less innovations than the releases that preceded it and had complaints about bugs that, unlike East and West Front, seemed never to be fixed.

All this reminiscing and I never got around to actually playing the game. I suppose you’ll have to wait until my next installment for that.

But, still, the saga continues.

In late 2015, the same “ground” was covered by a Matrix Game release, Campaign Series: Middle East. Looking very much like a Divided Ground II, it actually is based on a different evolution of the engine. To get there, we have to go back again, this time to 2007. Matrix aquired the Talonsoft rights and released the World War II games as the John Tiller’s Campaign Series product. This product is supported and upgraded to be compatible with current operating systems, as well as additional content and improved performance. It can still be bought, new, for probably significantly more than I paid for my Talonsoft CDs when I picked them up. Part of the plan was to, at some point, bring the Divided Ground code up to date in a similar manner. Instead, the decision was made to completely re-implement the Divided Ground concept within the current version of the World War II engine and release it as a new product.

For me, this proves to be an armored combat simulation too far. The new Matrix Game has the advantage that it is new and under active support. It also appears to have quickly developed a fan base for mods and scenarios. (One interesting mod allows the use of Arab-Israeli War counters as game icons). But at its core, it is based on the Talonsoft series and still looks like a 20-year-old gaming engine. Compare Europa Universalis with EU IV – that’s what I’d expect for a “new” version of a 15-year-old game, worth full price.

And still the tale goes on.

John Tiller’s took his gaming system first to HPS and then to his own John Tiller Software. What he did not take is the 250 km scale hexes. He has scaled up, to 1 km hexes and down to 40m hexes (with unit sizes of individual vehicles), but has taken neither system into the Arab Israeli conflict. While at HPS, he also created the Modern Campaigns/Panzer Campaigns engine (1 mile hexes) as an operational wargame. This system is used to cover the Arab Israeli Wars. In fact, the Tiller product line includes a tablet version of the game. More on this to come.

*I’m not trying to tell you what to do. But Divided Ground is abandoned software that nevertheless requires full price on Amazon. Furthermore, it is unlikely that it going to work on your computer. I was unable to install, perhaps because it was 64-bit machine and the installer software can’t handle that. It also may not work with Window 7 or 10.

**Bad AI seems to shadow the computer wargame industry to this day. Interestingly, the PC has also solved this problem, just not the way we wanted it to. Modern gamers can find opponents any time, day or night, through Skype and through computer-assisted gaming tools like VASSAL.

***One interesting aside. While High Command can be downloaded and run on a Windows 10 machine, Divided Ground pukes at the site of the Windows 7 box on which I first tried to install it. I got it running on older XP, but it is ironic that many of these early Windows games used special tricks which limited their life much more than all the wildness of DOS games.